Jean-Luc Godard`s Passages from the Photo

Transcription

ACTA UNIV. SAPIENTIAE, FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES, 4 (2011) 23–61
Jean-Luc Godard’s Passages from the
Photo-Graphic to the Post-Cinematic. Images in
between Intermediality and Convergence1
Ágnes Pethő
Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania (Cluj-Napoca, Romania)
E-mail: petho.agnes@gmail.com
Abstract. The article begins with an attempt to trace the various domains of
Godard’s widespread influence that reaches beyond contemporary cinema
in our post-media culture (installation art, literature, music, graphic
design, commercial videos, the current vogue of the “Godardesque” retro
look promoted on the scene of fashion world, and finally, photography).
The advertising strategies used by the Band of Outsiders fashion label
using Polaroid photos that reconstruct or imitate Godard images are
analysed in more detail, their connection with a “photo-op” culture and
the emergence of the “photo-filmic” image is emphasised. The article
then connects all these “Godardesque” features that survive in the postcinematic world to the intermedial use of photography in Godard’s
films that may have pre-figured their post-filmic appropriation. Some of
the relevant junctures are pointed out between “the cinematic” and the
“photographic” revealing how photography in Godard’s films seems to
offer a centre stage for inter-medial tensions but it can also facilitate the
assimilation by other media. His latest film, Film Socialisme is analysed
in this sense as an allegoric passage of the photographic image from
intermediality to media convergence.
“The photographic exists somewhere in-between;
it is a state of ‘in-between-ness.’”
Raymond Bellour (2008, 253.)
1
The article was written as part of a research project supported by the European Union
and co-financed by the European Social Fund (grant agreement no. TAMOP 4.2.1/B09/1/KMR-2010-0003).
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Ágnes Pethő
1. Jean-Luc Post-Cinema Godard
In the credit sequence of the Band of Outsiders (Bande à part, 1964), one of the
iconic films of the French New Wave, Godard “modestly” listed himself among
the creators of the film as “Jean-Luc Cinema Godard.” With the playful insertion
of the word “cinema” between his first and last names he forged a signature
revealing a strong sense of authorship in cinema that could be defined not
only by leaving an indelible mark over every aspect of a film, but also by being
interested (besides being the director/author of a film in the conventional sense)
in experimenting with the totality of what moving images can offer, a kind of
authorship that he practised throughout his long and prosperous career and that
eventually propelled him to the position of being perhaps the most influential
artist of his generation. Today modern (or post-modern) cinema is inconceivable
without Godard with influences ranging from Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese
to Wong Kar Wai, Takeshi Kitano, Aki Kaurismäki or Hal Hartley, Wes Anderson,
Jim Jarmusch, and many others.2 What is more, his extraordinary sensitivity for
addressing within his films key issues of the changes in technology, mediality and
context of moving images also makes him a major figure within those cinéastes
who exploit the possibilities of cinema’s intermedial status to bring into focus the
changing cultures of sight and sound within the twentieth century and beyond.
A decade after the turn of the millennium Godard celebrated his eightieth
birthday while his films have already moved on to be embedded within and to be
reflecting upon the so called “post-medium condition” of cinema. His grandiose
Histoire(s) du cinéma (The Histories of Cinema, 1988–1998) mourned the end of the
cinematic era, and his 2001 In Praise of Love (Éloge de l’amour) was considered by
David N. Rodowick (2007, 90) also as an “elegy for film” itself, a narrative allegory
of cinema’s passing from the analogue to the digital age. His short film, The Old
Place (2000) as well as his 2006 exhibition combining film projections and collage
works presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou3 in Paris experimented with
moving images introduced into and confronted with the traditions of the museum
space. Notre musique (Our Music, 2004) reflected on the visual constructions of
classical cinema facing the challenges raised by the appearance of small handheld
cameras. At the same time, Godard is not only an author who has had a notable
2
3
In the world of cinema Godard’s influence reaches even as far as the bizarre universe
of Japanese anime director Mamoru Oshii (e.g: The Red Spectacles, 1987; Talking
Head, 1992).
See a good description and evaluation of the project in Alex Munt’s (2006) article in
Senses of Cinema.
Jean-Luc Godard’s Passages from the Photo-Graphic ...
25
influence on filmmakers of different genres, but in this age of the ever expanding
field of moving images somehow he also succeeds in having an impact within
the most diverse artistic areas and sub-cultures that breed post-cinematic imagery
emulating decontextualised visual elements from his films.
A brief survey directed at the mapping of the main areas that register
Godard’s influence beyond cinema (i.e. beyond the obvious impact made upon
younger generations of film directors) may lead us to unexpected territories and
convergences. The rhizomatic connections that can be unearthed in pursuing
Godardian traces also shape another image of Godard beyond the archetype of the
modernist author, and even beyond the master in intermedial cinema, revealing
“Godard” as a unique brand name at the juncture where the “cinematic” and the
“photographic” converge.
Without the ambition to present a comprehensive listing of Godardian
associations leading outside cinema (and back) here are some of the fields
that have emerged in the last decade feeding on diverse aspects of his art and
artistic persona.
Perhaps the most obvious terrain is the avant-garde and experimental scene
where Godard’s inter-art influence is traceable in several domains. There have
understandably been several installation art projects that drew inspiration from
Godard in creating their own vision. One of these is the work of the New Yorkbased conceptual artist Adam Pendleton who refashioned elements from Godard’s
1968 film, Sympathy for the Devil, in his own 2010 video installation, titled Band,
substituting the experimental rock band named Deerhoof for Godard’s original
use of the Rolling Stones.4 A similar musical re-interpretation of Godard was
done by the William Parker Double Quartet who composed and performed a suite
of experimental jazz music based on one of his films (the Alphaville Suite, Music
Inspired by the Jean Luc Godard Film, the music was released as a CD album by
Rogueart in 2007).
In addition to a general influence of Godard’s cinematic style over modern prose
writing there are also cases in poetry in which we see more direct appropriations
of his techniques or themes. Jan Baetens, a Flemish poet and literary critic writing
in French composed a volume of verses “translating” Godard’s cinematic vision
into poetic imagery and called this a “novelization,” a reverse adaptation of film
into literature (Vivre sa vie, une novellisation en vers du film de Jean-Luc Godard/
4
See a description of the project here: http://www.ifc.com/news/2010/10/jean-lucgodard-inspired-band.php (The last date of access for all websites referred to in the
article henceforth is 7.09.2011.)
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Ágnes Pethő
Her Life to Live, a Novelization of the film by Jean-Luc Godard, published by Les
Impressions Nouvelles, Collection Traverses, 2005).5 Brigitte Byrd’s 2010 volume
of poetry published by Ahsahta, Song of a Living Room, is not a novelization
of a particular film like Baetens’s, but has also been characterised by reviewers
as Godard-esque due to the dense inter-art references, disconnected elements of
narration and the presence of a characteristic “voice-over” in the poems that is
reminiscent of Godard.6 What is interesting in these examples is that although
Godard has sometimes been accused of being more of a writer than a filmmaker,
preferring long, rambling dialogues and quotations from literature, these literary
texts connect to his films not through his emphatic use of poetry or language
but through his powerful cinematic imagery and subversive narrative devices.
These works do not simply “extract” some of the literary qualities of the films,
but create more complex intermedial passages: an unusual type of ekphrasis in
the case of the novelization or the resemblance to a “cinematic” voice (reinforced
with movie references) in the case of Byrd’s poetry.7
On the other hand, apparently Godard, the man of letters (or the “lettrist”
author of cinema), has been able to round up fans outside cinema even through
such relatively minor elements of his films like the characteristic graphic design
of his credit sequences and intertitles. The typeface used by Godard in several
of his 1960s films (written in his characteristic style of tricolour letters) has been
reproduced by a group of designers in a celebration of the eightieth birthday
of the cult director, and can now be obtained via the internet as the “Jean-Luc
fonts typeface” that is sent free of charge to fans’ e-mail addresses on request.
[Fig. 1.] The designers argue that the lettering is a kind of “found object” in
Godard’s cinema that originates in the “vernacular typography of the street.”8
5
6
7
8
Jan Baetens who is a Professor at the University of Leuven is also a scholar who has
done researches in intermediality, especially the phenomenon of novelization (see:
La novellisation. Du film au roman, 2008).
Robert Olen Butler writes in the online presentation of the book: “the poems of
Brigitte Byrd’s third book ask the reader to follow a ribbon threaded among music,
movies, poetics, and an unlinear sense of time.” See: http://ahsahtapress.boisestate.
edu/books/byrd2/byrd2.htm.
The American poet John Allman, who often resorts to movie references in his works,
has also recently published a trans-genre story titled “Godardesque” in the literary
journal Hotel Amerika according to a short online biography (see: http://www.
futurecycle.org/FutureCyclePoetry/JohnAllmanBio.aspx)
According to information posted on the website of the designers, Jean-Luc typeface “is
an uppercase-only display grotesque in two styles: one with normal bold accents and
punctuation, and one with hairline accents and punctuation, as seen in the title cards
for 2 ou 3 choses.” They confess: “It is so interesting to us because it is such a clear
renunciation of the ‘pretty,’ classical title screens that were common in that time’s
more conservative films. It has a more vernacular and brutishly low-brow character;
27
Godard’s obsession with the “spectacle” of writing, with coloured letters and
words decontextualised from neon advertisements or street signs, is carried on not
only in various areas of visual design, but in music videos as well. Outside regular
institutional channels, in the “brave new self-publishing world” of vimeo there
is a video clip created by Chateau Bezerra9 that has produced much favourable
reverberation in the blogosphere. The video accompanies “Melancholy Hill” by
The Gorillaz with a “visual cut-up poem” using only the neon signs of New York
reminiscent of Godard’s similar images from Pierrot le fou (1965), A Woman is a
Woman (Une femme est une femme, 1961) or Alphaville (1965). [Fig. 2.]
Music videos produced by established labels have not been shy either to convert
the Godard legacy to small change. Just to name two examples that used the same
film, Alphaville, as a “source template” for their imagery: Chris Applebaum’s
video for Kelly Osborne’s single, One Word10 [Figs. 3–4.], and Hype Williams’s
All of the Lights video for Kanye West featuring Rihanna and Kid Cudi,11 also
including the neon light lettering reminiscent of Une femme est une femme and
refashioning the famous coloured headlights car sequence from Pierrot le fou
(1965) that was used by Quentin Tarantino too in his pastiche of Godard within
Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005). The case of this latter video can be regarded
in this way as highly symptomatic for Godard’s rhizomatic influence. Even more
so, as the release of the video was accompanied by an argument over copyright
issues, Hype Williams was accused of copying Gaspar Noé’s stroboscopic credit
sequence of his film, Enter the Void (2009). Actually what the copyright dispute
ignored was the fact that Gaspar Noé designed the intro to his film as a tribute to
Godard, so actually both sequences were following in the footsteps of the author
of A Woman is a Woman. The irony is that Godard – who has often voiced his
scepticism regarding intellectual property – even included at the end of his recent
work, Film Socialisme, a mock FBI warning against “any commercial use or
duplication” of his film, at the same time indicating that such a law is not fair and
that consequently “justice” should prevail and not the word of the law. Thus he
9
10
11
this lettering comes from the street: We cannot prove this at all, but we think it may
be derived from the stencil letters of the Plaque Découpée Universelle, a lettering
device invented in the 1870s by a certain Joseph A. David, and first seen in France at
the 1878 Exposition Universelle, where it found broad appeal and rapid adoption. We
think this style of lettering was absorbed into the public domain vernacular of French
lettering, and that the 2 ou 3 choses titles are derived from these quotidien lettering
style” (see: http://www.carvalho-bernau.com/jlg/).
http://vimeo.com/16772996
The video can be watched on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wPnSI_xtK8
Video available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAfFfqiYLp0
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Ágnes Pethő
not only anticipated the DVD format of the movie and the illegal distribution or
use of his film within the post-cinematic world but also seems to have commented
on the already widespread (mis)appropriations of his own work. Such instances,
however, show not only how far the influence of Godard may reach but also how
such formalism has actually already “entered the void” compared to Godard’s
imagery that at the time of A Woman is a Woman could still be perceived as an
accurate rendition of the mixture between the “poetry” discernible in the colourful
city lights and the increasingly futuristic feel of the urban jungle.
Unlike music videos that refashion Godardian stylistic elements acquired
indirectly through multiple transfers (where their origin is often lost for the
viewers), the contemporary commercial scene has discovered in “Godard” a more
directly marketable brand. In 2007 Chanel launched a spot for its Rouge Allure
lipstick in tribute to Godard’s The Contempt/Le Mépris (1963)12 using Georges
Delerue’s original soundtrack and featuring Julie Ordon as a Brigitte Bardot
lookalike in a reconstruction of the film’s famous opening bed scene [Figs. 5–6.].
In May 2011 Richard Philips – an artist who is known for his hyper-realistic
portraits of Hollywood icons – created a 90 second short experimental video
which attempted something of a crossover between the clichés of a commercial
and an artistic commentary vis-à-vis the contemporary face of celebrity featuring
Lindsay Lohan. In this he portrayed the infamous American starlet in moments
designed to be reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) and Godard’s
Le Mépris.13 The video attests to the convergence (or at least to an experiment
in convergence) of the commercial appeal of both the young American actress
(who was making headlines at the time for her drug and alcohol abuse and court
ordered house arrest) and of the strong images deriving from Bergman’s and
Godard’s cinema, no matter how unsettling one may find such an equation.
2. Adopting the “Look:” JLG and Post-Photography
This market value of Godard is nowadays being repeatedly tested by the global
fashion world, a world that has become increasingly intermingled with show
business and cinema, and where there has been a veritable boom of promoting
12
13
The spot can be seen on several sites, e.g. here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8Qa2_bHDus. A photo-reportage documenting the
shooting of the video can be accessed here: http://lucire.com/2007/0531be0.shtml.
The video was shown as part of the Commercial Break series of short films presented
by the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture at the 2011 Venice Biennale. It is also
available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--rs7Ni7nmA
29
“Godardesque” as a trendy adjective associated with the recent penchant for
vintage looks. Several fashion shows and collections of clothes or accessories
within the last years have been designed and advertised as connected to the films
of the French New Wave in general and Godard in particular. One of the most
prominent shows was that of the Dior cruise collection presented in Shanghai,
in May 2011, then there was the collaboration between the Canadian handbag
designer Jessica Jensen and the young, New York based designer Alexander
Berardi14 who teamed up to produce a limited-edition handbag collection
alongside a selection of Berdardi’s spring/summer 2011 women’s ready-to-wear
line inspired by Breathless,15 as well as the “Cine Collection” of myPetsQuare in
2010 designed for spring 2011. This latter Australian collection was advertised
as “a unique brand of quirky clothing to the French New Wave with pieces
inspired by cult film director Jean-Luc Godard,” and the description went on
to lure the customer still deeper into Godard’s world: “the clothes are a lesson
in ‘60s cool, embracing off-the-cuff sex appeal and simple, super wearable
silhouettes. To get you in the mood, think Jean Seberg in Breathless circa 2010,
clad in bold stripes, printed tees with cute slogans, and boyish, cropped trousers.
Pair this with the nonchalant attitude of the arresting actress of Vivre sa vie (and
Godard’s wife!) Anna Karina and voilà! The stylish existentialist emerges. For
men, it’s a Bande à part affair, with sharp blazers, checked shirts and suspenders
marking modernity with Godard’s inimitable brand of retro surrealism. So act
fast, while it’s still a secret... aren’t you dying to turn the NYC streets into your
very own Alphaville?”16
Perhaps the deepest connections to Godard’s cinema are exploited by the Band
of Outsiders designer fashion label that borrowed the English title of Godard’s
cult film (Bande à part) – just like Quentin Tarantino who founded a production
company with another version of the same name (A Band Apart) – and like the
House of Berardi, it is also growing in popularity. According to the website of
New York Fashion, the label was created by Scott Sternberg who launched Band
of Outsiders in 2004, “designing recontextualised vintage-inspired looks with
14
15
16
Source: http://fashionights.com/post/1359490344/lg-fashion-week-jessica-jensenalexander-berardi
Berardi who is a kind of whiz kid in the industry (being only 24 years old and already
tremendously successful) excels in combining cinematic imagery and fashion design.
According to his official website his earlier, 2010 spring collection was inspired by
the entrancing thought of “Marlene Dietrich captaining a luxury yacht” and was
based on the “theme of classic Hollywood charisma.”
(See: http://www.houseofberardi.com/main.html)
Source of the quotation: http://www.refinery29.com/mypetsquare-babel-fair-nyc
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Ágnes Pethő
hand-sewn seams and shrunken proportions,” the label overview mentions
that “the brand’s overall look is one of sharply cut dress shirts and slim-fitting,
tailored suits and knits with a boyish appeal.”17
The Band of Outsiders Boy Fall 2009 presentation at the Fashion Week show
in Los Angeles was described by Angela Ashman’s review in the Village Voice in
the following way: “A stylish young man with a red bowtie ushers us upstairs to
the second floor, and suddenly it’s as though we’ve gone back in time to the ‘60s
– and, in fact, we have. Inspired by the 1967 Jean-Luc Godard film La Chinoise,
about young revolutionaries in Paris, designer Scott Sternberg has his models
posing at about 10 different sets, playing classic board games, watching blackand-white television, and talking at antique wooden phone booths.”18
Scott Sternberg’s Godardesque main edge comes from the overall vintage sixties
look. A similar appearance is also heavily promoted by the currently popular TV
show, Mad Men, with a fan base hooked on the sixties clothing and hairdos, thus
potentially coinciding at least partially with the customers of Band of Outsiders.
But unlike the chic imagery of corporate America of the sixties reconstructed
by the creators of Mad Men, Sternberg’s label markets a more youthful, offbeat,
sometimes even subversive image that rejects some of the established standards
of fashion, with clothes that are “preppy” yet do not project an image of glamour,
look affordable yet are in fact rather expensive in a kind of “working class hipster”
manner. Sternberg insists on a low-key yet visible connection with the cinematic
world and consistently organises his ad campaigns using actors (usually not highprofile stars) instead of runway models in photo shoots relying on mock serious
role play and unpretentiously “cool” poses. The actors chosen for his campaign
include: Jason Schwartzman (an established “indie” anti-star who came to be
known through prominent roles in Wes Anderson’s movies and HBO’s Bored
to Death, a deadpan comedy series that is infused with allusions to literature
and film), and relative newcomers to Hollywood like the British actor, Andrew
Garfield or James Marsden.
Sternberg’s themes of cinematic origin may vary (his latest fashion show in Milan
for the collection of 2012 Spring/Summer, was based on the 1961 musical West
Side Story) yet the “Godardesque” elements persist as a continuous undercurrent.
First of all this is ensured by a playful use of language (a hallmark of Godard’s
17
18
See: http://nymag.com/fashion/fashionshows/designers/bios/bandofoutsiders/. The
description posted on the website also mentions that – although increasingly popular
in the States – the label’s biggest market is Tokyo.
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2009/02/fashion_week_ka.php
31
cinema as well) – a “flair with words and grammar”19 as a review for the New
York Magazine observes – e.g. the men’s line is called “Band of Outsiders,” the
menswear-inspired clothes collection for women is called “Boy.” spelled with a
dot (later a more feminine line having been designed with the name “girl.” – this
time spelled with a lowercase “g” and a dot), and Sternberg’s line of fitted polo
shirts is named “This is not a polo shirt.” The label thus perhaps self-reflexively
acknowledges the fact that a shirt like this is primarily an appropriation of an
image and not a piece of clothing. The campaign for the shirts uses photographs of
all kinds of celebrities from the sixties and seventies to authenticate the creations
that were designed to imitate them (openly and free handedly borrowing images
available in various publications and on the internet). Godard himself is used as a
kind of “vintage model” in original photos that show him alongside Anna Karina,
Jean-Paul Belmondo and Eric Rohmer. [Figs. 7–10.]
Besides such re-contextualisations of old snapshots of celebrities, the campaign
for the Band of Outsiders label relies on the quasi improvised quality of an often
over- or underexposed looking series of Polaroid photographs or frames that
imitate Polaroid pictures [see Figs. 10–18.] These shots also feature recurring subtle
permutations of the typical visual ingredients of Godard films from the Nouvelle
Vague period like the bleak yet youthful apartment with magazine decoupages,
photos on the wall, piles of vinyl records that look similar to the clutter that spiced
up the settings of early Godard films like Charlotte and Her Boyfriend (Charlotte
et son Jules, 1958), Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960) or The Little Soldier
(Le petit soldat, 1963) while the newspapers and old photo cameras appear as
the typical props that turn up in most of these films [Figs. 11–14.] (and appear,
incidentally, also in the emblematic photo of Godard, Belmondo and Karina so
often used as an illustration that is reproduced in the polo shirt campaign, see
Fig. 9.). Other Polaroids capture the actor in characteristic poses: Jason
Schwartzman, for example, seems to be another Michel Poiccard on the run
in Chinatown [Fig. 15.], or place him into stylised spaces that are (re)painted
in bold colours with suggestive words written in large letters over the walls
(reminiscent of Pierrot le fou, see: Fig. 16.) or show him gesticulating like the
young revolutionaries “á la Chinoise” [Figs. 17–18.]. Such mock characters then
often end up in absurd combinations of Godardian motifs worthy of the grotesque
side of Godard’s spirit, e.g. exhibiting man versus space and exploiting the surreal
quality of the stylised setting [see Jason Schwartzman in Fig. 19.] or driving the
“Godardesque” feel to the extreme by creating a character that assumes the look of
19
http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2010/03/scott_sternberg_says_designing.html
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Ágnes Pethő
yet another undercover agent slash “rebel without a cause” while casually carrying
“Hanoi Jane” Fonda’s workout book20 under his arm as he stops outside the village
on the way to the golf course (?) [see Andrew Garfield in Fig. 20.]. The retro,
New Wave feel is further enhanced by the collection of photographs also posted
on the label’s official website with the title, featuring yet another pun, “Band of
Outtakes,” and in which we see photos that were supposedly “discarded” in the
process of assembling the final collection to represent the line. Some of these
photographs seem random takes, as if someone kept pushing the shutter-release
button of the photo camera, some of them – like the ones in which we see Jason
Schwartzman and his wife in their home under a giant poster of Louis Malle’s cult
movie, Zazie in the Metro (Zazie dans la metro, 1960) – reveal further connections
to the cinema of the Nouvelle Vague. The presence of the outtakes loosely links the
label both to the unsophisticated style of a New Wave type cinema and – maybe in
an ironic way – to the new vogue of appending outtakes as bonus features to DVD
versions of films, outtakes (i.e. images, scenes that were left out in the final editing
process, recordings of mistakes, etc.) that in this way aspire to a more revered,
collector’s item status (and as such serve the purpose of advertising the line just as
well as the photos included in the “official” collection).21
By using Polaroids, Band of Outsiders advertises an imagery that matches the
“cool,” unaffected air of the cinema vérité quality of Godard’s early films. It also
manages to project an image that presents itself as being beyond the conventional,
institutional channels and sustains the “rebellious” spirit of “outsiderism” by
preserving the vintage look of the pictures both in reference (allusions to the
films of the Nouvelle Vague) and in their quasi palpable and unique materiality
(the sometimes fuzzy quality of the instant image that preserves the moment as
it is without the possibility of retouching, the Polaroid’s feel as an object that
can be taken into one’s hand), something that goes against the much debated
current tendencies in fashion photography of extreme airbrushing and hightech manipulation of every aspect of the picture (making it exceedingly artificial
and immaterial yet as such compatible with all kinds of digital post processing,
20
21
During her brief radical period, when she became (in)famous for her protests against
the war in Vietnam and was dubbed “Hanoi Jane,” the American actress played
the leading role in Godard’s Tout va bien (1972) and consequently one of her press
photographs became the subject of Godard and Gorin’s Letter to Jane (1972). Later, in
the eighties, the actress became popular for her aerobic workout programme that she
promoted through several books and videos.
The Polaroid of Bret Easton Ellis showing him in his West Hollywood apartment
mock-seriously pointing a gun at a small toy deer on the table in front of him has
indeed good chances of becoming such an item sometime.
33
allowing for varying formats of distribution to converge: websites, print
magazines, billboards, television, etc.). The Polaroid is a form of “vernacular”
photography that has always been going somewhat against mainstream (it also
lacks the possibility of analogue reproduction), and has remained mainly within
the sphere of private usage as well as – in a lesser degree – within the practice
of the avant-garde that exploited the Polaroid’s uniqueness and its closeness to
hand-crafted fine art). The set of Polaroids in question constitute at the same
time a good example of how in our culture saturated with images a certain kind
of clever artifice may become the symptom of a desire for authenticity.22 What is
paradoxical is that this is a highly “self-conscious” image in its own right that
displays not so much an unaltered imprint of reality (the poses captured in the
fashion label’s campaign are clearly staged) but an imprint of an earlier, more
visible (and in this sense “honest”) technology,23 a technology that somehow
seems to be able to reflexively foreground both the haptic24 and the ontological
aspects characteristic of analogue photography in general, similarly to the effect
of the photogram which Rosalind Krauss claims “only forces, or makes explicit,
what is the case of all photography” (1986, 203).
The trick is, of course, similar to Godard’s old tricks of self-reflexivity in which
he shows the camera filming the movie on screen (e.g. Raoul Coutard filming the
introductory scene to Le Mépris) and makes the artifice of filmmaking (and the
cinematic apparatus that is usually hidden) visible, yet the presence of the camera
that actually films these images of the on screen camera still remains concealed.
In this way the rhetoric of self-reflexivity harbours in fact the same technique
as used in classical cinematic storytelling, just like the “image-conscious” use
22
23
24
At the same time the preference of Polaroids also connects the fashion campaign to
contemporary trends in avant-garde photography that – in a revolt against digital
photography – go back to using a wide array of photography’s analogue, manual forms
(e.g. daguerreotypes, collodion prints, photogram tintypes, carbon dichromates, etc.)
(More about this in: Rexer 2002.)
This is in a way something that exemplifies – with several notable twists around
artifice and self-reflexivity – what Kiku Adatto speaks of in connection with the
current fascination with pictures. “If one side of us appreciates, even celebrates, the
image as an image, another side yearns for something more authentic. We still want
the camera to fulfill its documentary promise, to provide us with insight, and to be a
record of our lives and the world around us. But because we are so alive to the pose,
we wrestle with the reality and artifice of the image in a more self-conscious way than
our forebears.” (Adatto 2008, 8.)
Besides Roland Barthes’s well-known book on photography (Camera Lucida, 1980), it
was Régis Durand (1996) who most emphatically dwelt on the tactile aspects of “seeing
photographically” and seeing photographs as objects (for a more recent elaboration
of possibilities in thinking of photography beyond the visual and acknowledge its
haptic and embodied aspects see Edwards, 2009).
34
Ágnes Pethő
of the Polaroid form and “texture” within the digital environment ultimately
complies with the current unifying frameworks of photographic representation.
The Polaroids in the Band of Outsiders campaign may be real (or some may even
be imitations), nevertheless, when we access these images on the web they have
already undergone the same digitisation process as all the other pictures that
surround them and they have been neatly fitted into an ensemble of a minimalist,
yet typical web “bricolage.”
These images (or fragments of images) re-framed by the fashion label’s campaign
have not only undergone a transference from cinema to photography, and a process
of trading a mythical cinematic past for a digital photographic presence,25 but the
performative value of the “Godardesque image” has been effectively appropriated
and exploited beyond the fashion world (i.e. beyond what Barthes called the
“image-garment,”26 the merchandising of an “image” that everyone can purchase
through the clothes) by the homogenising processes of convergence in the so
called “photo-op culture” itself. This is a world that not only conducts its life
driven by images and thrives on visual commodities but validates its existence
through various photo opportunities,27 a culture that conceives everything in its
potential for becoming a (marketable and public) photographic image and blurs
the boundaries of private and public spheres through promoting the “snapshot,”
the imprint of the moment – something that is professionally best done by
paparazzi hunting down politicians and celebrities, but is actually practiced
everywhere, something that brings photography into the focus more than ever
before beyond the general idea of a “society of spectacle,” glorifying the act of
“capturing” the photographic instance and pose (be it spontaneous or staged to
look as spontaneous). In this age of convergence the iconic value of an image
of Godard himself in a vintage photograph is no different than a photographic
still from his movies, or a photo remixing elements from his movies, they all get
to be distributed as single images that project the same idea of the “coolness”
of the moment branded by his name. Although the preference for the Polaroid
format may reveal a general yearning for more authenticity in the images, and the
understanding of the subtle references included in the Polaroid photo campaign
25
26
27
I have borrowed the expression from the title of Michelle Henning’s article (1995).
Cf. Barthes’s description and analysis of the components of the “fashion system” and
the “three garments” with their own set of structures: the photographic image, the
verbal description and the “real” clothing itself (Barthes 1983).
See more about the idea of this “picture-driven” culture and its ramifications over
all aspects of contemporary life from the everyday use of domestic photography and
home video to political campaigns, television newscasting, Hollywood gossip, social
or commercial networking over the internet – in Adatto (2008).
35
may require an understanding of Godard’s cinema (or the ironic twists involved
in marrying staged imagery paraphrasing Godard with the instant technology of
the Polaroid and its self-reflexive potential), consequently the advertising value
of the images may benefit from such a knowledge, the context that incorporates
these cinematic references considerably weakens its actual ties with Godard’s
cinema or with any reality other than that of the photo shoot itself (i.e. the fictional
“photo-op” event of playing “Godardesque”). It even makes it replaceable with
imagery from other films or from similar promotion of “vintage” politicians, film
stars or artists.28 We can cite the title of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s volume (2010)
that describes recent changes within film culture saying “goodbye cinema, hello,
cinephilia,” and state that there is a complex revival of practices of cinephilia
extending over the realm of cinema itself. This post-cinematic cinephilia shares
the attention given to details with traditional cinephilia,29 only it incorporates
these details into a post-photographic endorsement of almost anything, shifting
between disparate registers of visual culture with amazing ease.30
These last examples attest to Godard’s post-cinéphile survival in the
fashion industry via photography, or more precisely via appropriation of
single decontextualised images and visual elements translating the New Wave
idiosyncrasies into photographic poses that actually drift away from Godardian
cinema itself.31 However, there seems to be an inherent photographic quality,
a deep rooted possibility of intermedial dialogue between photography and
moving images in Godard’s films that continues to seduce the imagination of
photographers working in all kinds of areas. We have to note that it may not be a
coincidence that the commercial for the Rouge Allure campaign was devised by
a famed photographer (Bettina Rheims), and the Lindsay Lohan video was based
28
29
30
31
The website that features the photo of Godard promoting a vintage looking polo shirt
also features, among others, photos of John F. Kennedy, Clint Eastwood and Richard
Avedon. “Photo-op” can be seen in this way as one of the main channels for different
areas to converge and as something that levels cultural and media differences on the
digital image market.
This is defined by Mary Anne Doane as: “a love that is attached to the detail, the
moment, the trace, the gesture,” and “the moment when the contingent takes on
meaning” (2002, 226, 227).
In a recent re-evaluation of cinephilia in the digital age Thomas Elsaesser also noted
(even if his examples did not go beyond new forms of cinema itself) that cinephilia
can be seen not simply as a love of the cinema: “It is always already caught in several
kinds of deferral: a detour in place and space, a shift in register and a delay in time.”
(Elsaesser 2005, 30.)
For an author like Godard, who himself was not a stranger to the Situationist technique
of “détournement” (i.e. subversive appropriations and re-contextualisations), this is
ironically within the reach of what he himself often parodied.
36
Ágnes Pethő
on iconic cinematic frames as the first incursion of a painter known for his photorealistic style into the art of moving images.
Furthermore, several contemporary photographers who have singled out
Godard films as a source of inspiration or imitation seem to have also recognised
this inherent connection between Godard and photography. Some of these
photographic projects tap directly into the cinematic world of Godard and
recreate or paraphrase individual images from his films. Just to name a few of
such examples: there is a whole gallery of photos reconstructing memorable
images from Breathless by Martin Crespo32 that can be accessed on his website
[Fig. 21.]; Mike Kobal33 did a photo-reconstruction as well as a video based
on the photo shoot inspired by the same Breathless. Anna Karina and Vivre
sa vie proved to be similarly “photogenic:” as we can see in the photo gallery
posted online in 2011 by the Italian photographer, Bizarremind [Figs. 22–23.].34
The Georgian photographer Tina Shaburishvili who works for the magazine
AMARTA has also recently shot a series of photographs inspired by Jean Luc
Godard’s Breathless and Pierrot le fou.35 Perhaps the most outstanding of the
photographic projects linked to Godard’s cinema is Nancy Davenport’s Weekend
Campus (2004), a crossover between photography, installation art and cinema
that has already been the subject of substantial theoretical discussions about “the
expanded field of photography” (see Baker 2005). Weekend Campus36 consists of
a continuous loop of hundreds of single photographs stitched together in a simple
computer animation so that they show a slow horizontal pan along the entrance
to a fictitious campus revealing a long traffic jam with crashed and overturned
cars and bored onlookers, inspired by the famous continuous tracking shot from
Godard’s Weekend (1967).37 [ Figs. 24–25.]
Pictures like these are not only single, isolated incidents that re-mediate cinema,
but through examples like these we can understand how contemporary postphotography designates cinema as one of its possible major resources. As Geoffrey
32
33
34
35
36
37
See: http://www.pbase.com/crespoide/a_bout_de_souffle
See: http://www.mikekobal.com/blog/?p=20
See: http://www.bizarremind.com/archives/646
See: http://www.dazeddigital.com/photography/article/9576/1/rise-tina-shaburishvili.
Besides these examples just a random search over the internet reveals countless uses
and “adaptations” of Godard imagery displayed over photo and video sharing sites
like Flickr, YouTube or DailyMotion.
Stills are available on the artist’s website: http://www.nancydavenport.com/
weekendcampus1.html
Another possible source is Andy Warhol’s Disaster series (a series of paintings
inspired by newspaper photos of car crashes, accidents and violent scenes of death
from 1963), something that may have inspired Godard as well.
37
Batchen (2000, 109) observed: “Where once art photography was measured
according to the conventions and aesthetic values of the painted image, today the
situation is decidedly more complicated. Over the past two decades, the boundary
between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or performance has
become increasingly porous.” We could, of course, add cinema to the list of other
media mentioned by Batchen and acknowledge that this is a process in which the
“cinematic” is assimilated by the “photographic” in the broadest possible sense,
while the “photographic” itself nowadays appears to be undergoing a wide array
of dissemination, as – to quote Batchen (2000, 109) – “it would seem that each
medium has absorbed the other, leaving the photographic residing everywhere, but
nowhere in particular.” (In this case the Godardian reproductions take the form of
digital photography, video, photographic single print or web collage, all of them
accessible and marketable over the internet. See Figs. 11–25.)
Post-photography in this way “returns the favour” to the seventh art by reappropriating the photographic quality of modernist cinema and the iconic value
of one of its emblematic authors. As mentioned before, the recent vogue of the
post-Godardian convergence between the “photographic” and the “cinematic” has
been undoubtedly facilitated by the intermedial quality residing in Godard’s work
itself: his modernist films used to incorporate the aesthetics of still photography
in the process of forging a self-reflexive pictorial language.38 Even so, postphotography re-frames the “photogeneity” of modern film (or, in certain cases, of
the players on the scene of modern film) not only from an aesthetic point of view,
but most often from the perspective of the performative world of the “photo-op,
and displays it in a context of (commercial) digital image convergence. Thus the
interplay between processes of convergence and intermediality observable in the
phenomena of “post-cinema Godard” is one of the most multilayered possible,
exemplifying how media differences and interactions (i.e. inter-mediality) can
be not only meaningful but also exploited (e.g. in the Polaroid commercials),
and also how these differences can be eventually weakened or obliterated by
processes of post-media convergence.
In an editorial to a recent issue of the journal History of Photography, Ingrid
Hölzl acknowledges that there is “a need for a paradigm shift in the study of
photographic images,” stating that: “most of the literature does not call into
question the opposition still/moving, but investigates instead the relation of still
38
This seems to be relevant even though we can say that a “photo-op” culture is
omnivorous and such processes of convergence between the world of cinema, digital
photography, fashion or commercial videos are quite common irrespective of the
qualities of the cinematic author.
38
Ágnes Pethő
and moving images.” (Hölzl 2011, 2.) Streitberger and Van Gelder argue that “the
photo-filmic” should in fact be regarded as a phenomenon of contemporary visual
culture as a whole and not “as a mere conjuncture of two existing, principally
distinguishable mediums” (i.e. photography and film), furthermore, they consider
that “photo-filmic images not only entail a profound shift in our contemporary
visual culture but, more specifically, are at the very heart of these changes in
terms of the production, the use, and the perception of images” (2010, 51–52).
The findings of this present article support this very idea.
Furthermore, what emerges most strongly from all these previously mentioned
examples is the value of single, decontextualised cinematic images in a world of
convergence,39 and the rhizomatic interlacings between cinema, the art scene as
well as the most diverse terrains of image consumption. A photo may be worth
a thousand films as Jan Baetens (2009) suggests analysing the narrative potential
of a Cartier Bresson photograph. By the same token, the photographic quality of
Godard seems to be worth a thousand post-cinematic ramifications. All in all, as
the “cinematic turn” of contemporary photography40 can be considered a reversal
of modern cinema’s manifold “photographic” affinities, these “affinities” are also
worth a closer look. So let us make a digression into investigating the role of the
“photographic” images and photographs in Godard’s films themselves that may
(or may not) have foreshadowed their “photo-filmic” appropriation.
3. Back to the Future of Photography in Godard’s Films
In Godard’s vast oeuvre there are several junctures where “the cinematic” and
the “photographic” coexist and merge. The implications of the subject are far too
vast for even the slightest possibility of exhausting the subject here, so I would
merely like to sketch some of the relevant meeting points and emphasise their
typology. What I would like to highlight is that in each case photography seems
to offer a vantage point that is both “inside” (as an integral part of the “medium:”
film being constituted by the individual frames/photograms, or being part of the
diegetic world of the film as photographs appearing on screen) and “outside”
39
40
Even in the case of music and literature, the impact of Godard’s single images seems
to be important, not to mention the huge impact of the graphic design of his title
sequences that also provide single, well defined qualities in the image that can be
easily subjected to extreme variations which nevertheless still remind us of the
original.
The term is borrowed from Baker’s essay mapping some of the tendencies that link
photography to cinema (see: 2005, 122).
39
of the seamless flow of moving images (as a perspective that reveals its basic
characteristics from an aesthetic distance or that offers a commentary upon the
world revealed in the film). Photography offers a centre stage both for cinematic
self-reflection and for formulating ideological messages; it can activate intermedial tensions but it can also facilitate assimilation by other media.
a) The modern film image and its relation to photography and “becoming”
photographic
There are several books that amply discuss modernity’s complex and
fundamental relationship to photography in the cinema both from the point of
view of the ideology of modernism and the point of view of the aesthetics of the
single image. Leaving aside treatises that debate various forms of thematisations
of the indexical nature of photographical representation, or the implications of the
poetics of the long take that moves the experience of the moving pictures closer
to the contemplation of still frames, there are two other theoretical avenues that
connect more closely to the interlacing of cinema and photography especially in
Godard’s early films. One of these approaches is exemplified by Garrett Stewart’s
(1999) detailed analysis of modern film which presents modern film as a kind
of “photo-synthesis” and dwells on the “flicker effect” of individual images
fragmenting the fluidity of classical cinematic aesthetics of visual and narrative
transparency. Through these techniques – as Stewart contends (1999, 265) – “film
fulfils the genealogy not of mimesis but of text,” film becomes conceivable as a
sequence of “photo-graphemes,” of “writing with images,” images appear to be
put together as building blocks in a puzzle. In early Godard due to extreme deframings and a hectic montage enhanced by jump cuts, even without the use of
the split screen (as employed in Numéro Deux, 1975) images look sometimes,
to quote Robert Stam’s words, as if they “are ‘hung’ on the screen like paintings
in a gallery” (1992, 227). The extreme photographic de-framings of the images
also enable chiastic combinations that underscore the idea of the film’s mosaiclike structure (e.g. A Married Woman. Fragments of a Film Made in 1964/Une
Femme Mariée. Suite de fragments d’un film tourné en 1964, see: Figs. 26–31),
and suggest that the film is released in an “unfinished” form, suspended in the
phase of a kind of photo-graphic writing. This may also remind us of Raymond
Bellour’s concept regarding the intermediary position of the single image. He
states: “The ‘photographic’ as I imagine it, is not reducible to photography even
while borrowing part of its soul and the fate of which we believed photography
to be the guardian. The photographic exists somewhere in-between; it is a state
40
Ágnes Pethő
of ‘in-between-ness:’ in movement it is that which interrupts, that paralyzes; in
immobility it perhaps bespeaks its relative impossibility” (Bellour 2008, 253).
Regarding the essential link between the art of photography and modern
cinema, Damian Sutton – relying on Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts – even
sustains that there is actually a continuum between photography and film, not an
essential opposition that theorists keep insisting upon. He writes the following:
“The substance of photography is continuous, though stretched and formed by
culture into the shapes of cinema and the photograph. Cinema and photography
[…] are ideas used to create objects from a monadic, folding continuum of the
photographic.” (Sutton 2009, xii.) Later summarising this “folding,” “becoming”41
relationship between the two mediums like this: “Cinema relies on the photography
that comes to life, of which the still and projected image are both constituents.
However, the monadic, folding substance is the photographic itself, the cominginto-being of the image that is an essential part of both. […] The strip of photograms
that make up cinema are not broken moments reconstituted into movement but
instead are folds in the monadic continuum of photography; the still image itself
is the fold between two images of time – the rational order of the movement
image and the glimpsed duration of the time-image.” (Sutton 2009, 123–124.) The
original subtitle of Godard’s A Married Woman (“a suite of fragments from a film
shot in 1964”) eloquently supports this idea in its self-reflexive way of conceiving
cinema as a series of photographic frames shot and assembled, disassembled,
edited together in the visible process of making a cinematic statement. While a lot
has been said about the permutations seen in the film regarding the relationship
of the wife, lover and husband and also of the representation of genders (and the
cut up representation of bodies), this relationship between the “photographic”
continuously folding into the “cinematic” and the “cinematic” unfolding into
the “photographic” is perhaps the film’s most relevant feature from a medial
perspective. As such this technique proved to be essentially modernist, and did
not only facilitate the more recent “photo-filmic” fusion of Godardesque frames
within post-media contexts, but it also enabled the film to be easily “translated”
into a photo-novel, as just another “fold” of the same “strip.” A Married Woman
was indeed published in this form, together with almost all of Godard’s New Wave
41
“Becoming” is one of the key terms introduced by Deleuze and Guattari in their
seminal work, A Thousand Plateaus (1987) that is clearly separated from ideas of mere
formal imitation and in which (e.g. in their words: “Becoming is always double, that
which one becomes no less than the one that becomes—block is formed, essentially
mobile, never in equilibrium. […] Becoming is never imitating.” 2005, 305) and always
involves the actualisation, the emerging of something “minoritarian” and virtual.
41
films.42 While most great modern films featured arrested moments that staged the
emergence (the “becoming”) of the photographic image within the medium of
cinema (see Bergman’s iconic image from the prologue of Persona – incidentally,
the image that has been most often copied43 or re-contextualised from his art –
or Antonioni’s final image from L’Avventura), some other New Wave filmmakers
also experimented intensely with the deconstruction of the moving pictures into
still images and called attention to the moments of the birth of the photographic
within the cinematic, and vice versa (see Agnès Varda’s L’opéra mouffe, 1958,
Salut les cubains, 1963, Chris Marker’s44 La Jetée, 1962).
b) Harnessing the performative value of on-screen photographs and the
photographic act
Godard’s use of photographs within his films is not only wide ranging but again
extremely multilayered in possible meanings. Whenever photographs are used as
props within a setting or used as key elements in a diegesis they always perform
multiple functions of reflexivity. Photos (together with other pictures, like paintings
or magazine decoupages) can primarily be “reminders” of the photographic nature
of the filmic representation,45 and as such count on a primary level as the selfreflection of the medium. Occasional inclusions of the negative photographic images
[see: Figs. 32–33.] also serve the same purpose of “folding” the image inside-out:
42
43
44
45
A fact that is perhaps lesser known to the contemporary viewers: many modernist
authors preferred to publish their works also in the form of photo-romans as an attempt
to reach a broader audience and to experiment with the fusion of photography, film
and literature. As David Campany (2008, 86–87) explains: “The photonovel began
to die away in the 1960s with the rise of television, eventually becoming obsolete
when domestic video made films ‘possessable’ and DVD supplied the supplements
and commentaries beloved of fans and scholars. But as it waned the page did become
the site for new forms of cinematic analysis. European filmmakers, particularly from
the French New Wave, took up the book as a means of re-presenting and expanding
their films. Alain Robbe-Grillet reworked his scripts written or films directed by
Alain Resnais (including L’Année dernière à Marienbad, 1961) into ciné-romans or
‘cine-novels.’[…] Godard published print versions of nearly all his films of the 1960s.
Some were straightforward illustrated scripts, others more experimental. The book
based on Une femme mariée (1964) recreates the episodic first-person structure of
the film as word/image scrapbook. Where the film shows the lead woman confronted
with representations of commodified femininity on billboards, magazines and movie
posters, the book appropriates various layout styles from popular culture.”
This is the image paraphrased also by Richard Philips in his Lindsay Lohan video
portrait.
Godard recognised the novelty of Marker’s photo-filmic impact early on by including
one of Marker’s photographs as the image that is scanned by the camera in the credit
sequence of Alphaville.
Garrett Stewart (1999, 9) notes: “The photogrammatic undertext of screen narrative
may be (more or less implicitly) alluded to on-screen by ‘quoted’ photos.”
42
Ágnes Pethő
self-reflexively directing the attention towards the photographic “undertext” of the
image in making the image transparent towards its own technology and distantiating
it both from its conventional aesthetics and its representational “reading.” On a
secondary level the abundance of photographs in the films are used diegetically to
identify and multiply the characters as well as to pin down the visual models on
which their lives are moulded (photos of films stars in early films always denote
such ideals that the female characters aspire to, e.g. Charlotte and Her Boyfriend,
Vivre sa vie), photographic identification is also used as clichés of detective novels
(Alphaville, The Little Soldier) or to denote more complex affinities (e.g. Bogart’s
photo in Breathless as opposed to the reproductions of paintings that the female
character is seen in analogy with),46 or self-reflexively refer to Godard’s previous
films. [Figs. 34–37.] In all of these cases the photographs included in the films serve
a similar purpose to the function of alter-ego characters and mirrors: in the spirit of
the typical modernist theme of the traumatic experience of serialisation, they become
performers of the multiplication and dissolution of identity, transforming the actual
characters into mere images and amalgams of refracted images that can be further
reflected ad infinitum (photographs in this case being only one of the media that
participate in these permutations besides drawings, paintings, other film images).
Photographic representation is also one of the main ideological targets of
Godard’s early films. In Weekend we have a suggestive intertitle in this respect
in which he spells “photographie” as “faux-tographie” (“faux” = false) alluding
perhaps to the paradoxes of visual representation. Thus photography becomes for
Godard a platform to exhibit and denounce among others: the objectification of
women, the class representational value of group photos (see the ironic group poses
in Weekend, 1967; and Tout va Bien, 1972; Figs. 38–39.), the commodification
of images in general in “a society of the spectacle” (see the young men from
The Carabineers, 1963, discovering/consuming the world through tons of
photographic images), the contrast between glossy pictures of advertisements and
gruesome photographs of war (e.g. 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her, the pictures on
the wall of the room in The Little Soldier, La Chinoise). Writing (or speaking) over
an encyclopedic collage of photographic representations (see: La Chinoise, Le
Gai Savoir/The Joy of Learning, 1969) can also provide the possibility of a further
subversive use of commercial images47 and of creating a montage/palimpsest of
46
47
See more about this in Pethő (2011, 231–265).
It is ironic to observe how Godard’s collages often use the same fashion photography
for the purposes of denouncing visual consumerism [see Fig. 40.] that nowadays
is attributed to the “Godardesque” trend of the sixties retro fashion world (see the
descriptions of the characteristics of the Band of Outsiders clothing line).
43
ideas. [Figs. 40–41.] All in all Godard’s films prove to be accurate renditions of
the intrusion of photography into all layers of modern life, clear intuitions of its
future, and incisive comments upon its multifarious commodification.
Presenting the photographic act itself is always a reinforcement of the
performative value of the photographs in all these aspects. Godard’s characters
are incessantly seen in the company of photographers. Michel Poiccard in
Breathless finds a temporary haven in the photo studio of a paparazzo, Lemmy
Caution brings his small camera to Alphaville, Bruno in The Little Soldier is
trying to seduce Veronica through a photo session and is tempted to engage in an
impromptu philosophy of the photograph [Fig. 42.], Nana in Vivre sa vie aspires
to become a film star but does not get further than getting her pictures taken, in
Le Vent d’Est (Wind from the East, 1970) we see a group of young revolutionaries
meeting in a wood and taking pictures as they debate their ideas, one of them
is meticulously taking the photo of a rifle thrust into the ground (as another
montage of ideas adding up “photography” and “gun” and “shooting”), and so
on. [Fig. 43.] All these acts of taking photos, the repeated gestures of making
pictures, even hanging pictures on the wall, commenting on pictures or just
placing characters in spaces populated by pictures in these films emphasise the
reflexive process of “becoming” an (photographic) image (also in the Deleuzian
sense used by Sutton).
c) The photographic versus the cinematic in radical and late Godard: the still
image as inter-media platform
Modernism is the real age of intermediality, it is the paradigm in which media
differences are still relevant and meaningful, in which media borders are worth
challenging, whilst in the paradigm of post-media convergence the boundaries
have already been effectively blurred by the ubiquitous digital environment and
we have “the flow of content across multiple media platforms” (Jenkins 2006, 2).
In this sense, Godard’s post-New Wave oeuvre showcases intermediality in its
most tensional forms, and traces cinema’s passage into the age of convergence;48
furthermore, in this latter aspect photography once again is assigned a major role.
Yvonne Spielmann (2008) sees the medium of video (and its close ties with
television) as a key stepping stone in understanding the emergence of post48
If in early Godard works inter-media tensions were all about cinema’s relations to the
other arts, and mainly its Oedipal relationship to literature and text as the authority
that had to be effectively challenged and emulated at the same time (see more about
this in Pethő 2011, 231–317), Godard’s video and late cinematic work evolves around
the perspective of new media for cinema.
44
Ágnes Pethő
media phenomena.49 In Godard’s so called radical period after 1968 as well as
his “late” works we see an intense preoccupation with the technology of video
that nevertheless brings to the surface – perhaps even more acutely than before
– questions related to the aesthetics and philosophy of the “single image” and its
relation with the medium of moving images. As Yvonne Spielmann writes in her
book on “video the reflexive medium:” “whereas for photography and also for
film the single image or a sequence of framed single images is what matters, video
distinguishes itself by the fact that the transition between the images are central.”
(2008, 4). Against the “fluid pictoriality” and the “frame unbound image” of
video Godard accentuates the potential of arresting the image (slowing it down,
showing it at different speeds, freezing it as a tableau vivant) and explores the
way in which film images seem to be positioned between stasis and motion,
between painting and photography – as we see it in his feature films Sauve qui
peut (la vie)(Every man for Himself/Slow Motion, 1980), Passion (1982). Or he
experiments with a series of short films and documentaries explicitly built on
the contrast of video/television and still imagery, the most remarkable of these
being his Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (1972), a film constructed
entirely on the verbal commentary added to, and the image associations conjured
up by, a single photograph.50
Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1976) is also remarkable in this sense – as
Deleuze already noticed51 – because it mixes the fluid here and now of the TV
viewer experience (declaring the consumer of TV and newspaper images as a
“millionaire in images”) with the “arrested” self-reflection of the still frame. In
one of the sequences we have people moving in front of the camera, each with a
photo in their hands while Godard elaborates on the contrast between the ideas
49
50
51
She writes: “video already produces, both inter- and intramedially, the dialogue
between an image type, which originates, on the one hand, in the fixed inscription
into a surface, and on the other, in a processual image type, which lets the passage
from analog to digital emerge in electronic transformativity. This difference from
other analog media also explains the basis on which its media-specific features of
processuality and transformativity, effectively predestined to play a decisive role
in the intermedial context of computers’ development – and of the more complex
hypermedia.” (Spielmann 2008, 6.)
I have pointed out elsewhere the ekphrastic qualities of this film (cf. Pethő 2011, 306–
307). Similar experiments with films based on commentaries of single photographs
can also be seen in later works of Godard’s contemporary directors (Jean Eustache:
Les photos d’Alix, 1980, Agnes Varda: Ulysse, 1986; Chris Marker: Le souvenir d’un
avenir, 2003).
In his famous second book on cinema Deleuze extracted the “and” of the title and
built an entire interpretation of Godard’s language around the notion of “interstice”
marked by it (cf. Deleuze 1989, 179–181).
45
that can be embodied by the single images (as symbols, emblems) and the way
motion pictures push the individual images out of the frame one after the other
in a flow. [Figs. 44–47.] Similar gestures of setting cinema and photography in
opposition return in Notre Musique (Our Music, 2004) where again Godard uses
photographic stills (of one of Howard Hawks’s films) to speak about the way
meaning is constructed or differences fail to be perceived in cinematic shot–
countershot techniques that put two identical frames face to face.
King Lear (1987) heralds in a new type of intermedial cinema that relies heavily
on the inclusion and/or superimposition of still imagery within the moving
pictures and the voice over commentary of Godard himself, a formula that will be
exploited to the fullest in his Histoire(s) du cinema, as well as his latest shorts. In
King Lear Godard again explicitly stresses the communicative value of the single
image. He explains (paraphrasing one of Bresson’s notes on cinema): “If an image
looked at separately expresses something clearly, if it involves an interpretation,
it will not transform itself in contact with other images. The other images will
have no power over it, and it will have no power over the other images.” Late
Godard is full of elegiac and philosophic meditations about the image within
cinema (and the missed opportunities of cinema to fulfil the “promise” of the
photographic image in the twentieth century). The Godard of the Histoire(s) is
primarily a passionate collector of images and a photo-monteur who forged for this
audio-visual essay a unique composite of “archaic” photographic and cinematic
techniques of juxtaposition of images52 that also pre-figure something of what may
come after traditional cinema in an age of personalised post-mediality. As such,
Histoire(s) pre-figures the convergence of an infinite number of images over the
platform of a single hybrid medium, but this medium is one of his own making,
not only in the sense of its unique hybridity, but in the literal sense that it is
Godard’s “handicraft” (sealed with the authenticating signature of his own voice
and self-portrait).53 It is the achievement of a single author created in the intimate
surrounding of his personal film studio, far from the practices of classical (and
institutional) film making and very close to the practices of the image remixes
that nowadays anybody can perform with a few clicks on the keyboard.
52
53
I have published a detailed analysis of the medial aspects of Godard’s Histoire(s) in
a chapter entitled Post-Cinema as Pre-Cinema and Media Archaeology in Jean-Luc
Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema in my book Cinema and Intermediality. The Passion
for the In-Between (2011, 317–340).
See also another approach to this in: my article (Re)Mediating the Real. Paradoxes of
an Intermedial Cinema of Immediacy (Pethő 2009).
46
Ágnes Pethő
4. The Common Good of Images: Film Socialisme and
Godard’s Passage into the Post-Media Age
Histoire(s) may have only foreshadowed practices of image-handling that have
become our everyday experience, however, much of Godard’s latest full length
feature film, Film Socialisme (Film Socialism, 2010) was actually shot using
various kinds of digital technology available both in cinema and outside cinema,
attesting to the amazing fact that in our post-media age he successfully continues
to make use of the emerging new technologies of the moving images. Godard
also seems to record in this film – appropriately staging the whole film on board
of a ship – the final moments of the Odyssey of the photographic image and
the passages of the viewer’s experience from being a “millionaire of images”
(who possesses a plethora of pictures as a “common good,”54 and from being
the active stroller down the lanes of the “museum of memory”55) into becoming
a “millionaire of photographic media” that produce and project photographic
images, photo-filmic experiences of all resolutions, formats and contexts. Thus
the whole film can be interpreted as an allegoric passage of the photographic
image from intermediality (i.e. the dialogue of photography and film, image and
text) to media convergence and confluence of media. Film Socialisme is replete
with images of people taking photos. [Figs. 48–57.] Photographers are seen
everywhere, snapshots are taken, shutters are clicking incessantly, flashes flare
and the world is revealed as a hyper- and multi-mediated voyage through seeing
“photographically.” The theme of ubiquitous photography, of hands holding
photo cameras of all types and sizes runs through the whole film as a leit motif.
Godard manages once more a tour de force: he uses cinema (and the format of a
feature film) not primarily as an “intermedial battlefield” as he used to,56 but as the
site of media convergence (something that stresses hybridity and dissemination:
given that different visions offered by different devices seen or unseen in the
film alternate and modulate within a musical structure without their differences
being really brought into play) and as the site to reflect on media convergence
(turning the pitfalls of convergence against itself, managing to transfer a synthesis
54
55
56
The title in this way could be interpreted less with a political connotation and
more in the direction of a universality and democratisation of imagery and means
of handling imagery.
See especially the second half of the film rehashing Godard’s main ideas in this sense
and resembling the structure of the Histoire(s).
See the chapter: “Tensional Differences:” The Anxiety of Re-Mediation in Jean-Luc
Godard’s Films (Pethő 2011, 231–265).
47
of his earlier ideas and the “music” of the images over yet another platform). He
successfully appropriates once more (just as he did with earlier image forms:
i.e. photography, video, television and digital cinema) a new media mixture of
words and images that delight the eye and feast the senses with rich textures
and colours, folding it into a configuration that is still identifiable as “cinema.”
The ultimate irony is of course the trailer of the film that “enfolds” the speeding
up of the entire film that becomes in this way an absurd, literal pre-view, or an
impossible view due to the speed of the images adjusted so that the whole film
could fit the conventional time frame of the web “teaser.”
Film Socialisme has produced an unprecedented buzz all over the blogosphere,
just to keep track of all the internet reviews, YouTube entries, protests or comments
is a task that one cannot easily undertake. And I have to confess, that I myself
might be included in the mass of typical post-media consumers of Godard’s art:
while I am writing this article, I am alternately (sometimes simultaneously)
watching parts of Godard’s films on my computer, every now and then pausing
the images as I am not being able to resist capturing relevant snapshots by the
dozen. I keep wondering: am I in this way the “pensive spectator” that Raymond
Bellour (1987) predicted and Laura Mulvey (2006) described, or am I somehow
beyond that? Maybe such an activity is less “pensive,” but it is certainly more
“tactile,” as it brings me closer to the creative process of virtually “handling”
the images, arranging them, observing them as individual frames, deciding
which captured instance to keep and which to discard in the recycling bin. My
computer has increasingly acquired the status of a cinéphile notebook, and of
a personal editing machine: I find myself taking “visual notes” all the time. In
doing so Godard’s recurrent self image comes to my mind sitting in his own
video “workshop” with the small monitors in front of him. And I increasingly
identify with him in that posture, I feel the excitement of “making the images
happen,” I become something in-between a projectionist and a photo-monteur,
a craftsman of singular pictures. As the frames are “carved out” by my own
actions on the keyboard the shots become my personal collection of photo-filmic
images.57 The images on the computer screen are all at the “tip of my fingers,”
yet paradoxically they remain more distant than ever, as I have never seen their
content in “reality” (which makes them different from my other snapshots that I
take with my own photo-camera and that I also store digitally), and in most cases
I have never seen the film in a cinema either. The individual shots remain utterly
57
The screenshots printed here as Figs. 26–57 may also be considered as a small sample
from this collection.
48
Ágnes Pethő
virtual, yet “manageable” for me. I look at these “quasi photographs” on a unique
level of “virtual immediacy” and savour the unexpected fine details discovered
in them that I would have missed in a cinema, in a viewing involving both a
more pronounced “aesthetic distance” and a totally different feel of immersion
in bodily space.58
Beside the blogosphere where entries discussing Godard’s films are
mushrooming day by day, Godard’s real post-cinematic life can be traced also
to such private contexts and activities like mine, to the electronic collection of
a post-cinematic cinéphile, someone who has appropriated Godard’s cinematic
images in gigabytes worth of screenshots alongside one’s private photographs/
films and the Godard films themselves amassed in different formats. As his
wide-ranging extra-cinematic influence as well as Film Socialisme demonstrates
(together with my personal and somewhat erratic collection): Godard, the “father
figure” of modernist intermediality has also successfully passed the tests of the
age of convergence. Amid the profusion of photo-filmic images, Godard, the
thinker in strong individual frames still sails large: both as a source of imagery
convertible as “Godardesque” and as a role model for appropriating new media
as effective forms of reflection and – last but not least – also for taking images into
our own (virtual) hands.
References
Adatto, Kiku. 2008. Picture Perfect. Life in the Age of the Photo Op. Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Baetens, Jan. 2008. La novellisation. Du film au roman. Bruxelles: Les Impressions
Nouvelles.
Baetens, Jan. 2009. Is a Photograph Worth a Thousand Films? Visual Studies vol.
24 no. 2: 143–148.
Baker, George. 2005. Photography’s Expanded Field. October no. 114 (Fall): 120–140.
Barthes, Roland. 1981 [1980]. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New
York: Hill and Wang.
58
Jonathan Crary (1992, 1) describes how new technologies are “relocating vision to a
plane severed from a human observer.” He argues that the idea of a “real, optically
perceived world” has been undermined, and considers that “if these images can be
said to refer to anything, it is to millions of bits of electronic mathematical data.”
However, this is only partially true, in the tactile everyday “immediacy” of these
captured images on my computer, the vision is no longer “severed” from my personal
observation, quite the contrary; I re-personalise them on a unique and hybrid level of
my own individual “screen” or “archive,” and in the context of my private space.
49
Barthes, Roland. 1983 [1967]. The Fashion System. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
Batchen, Geoffrey. 2000. Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Bellour, Raymond. 1987. The Pensive Spectator. Wide Angle no. ix/1: 6–11.
Bellour, Raymond. 2008. Concerning “the Photographic.” In Still Moving: between
Cinema and Photography, eds. Karen Beckman, Jean Ma, 253–277. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Campany, David. 2008. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books.
Crary, Jonathan. 1992. Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in
the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 [1985]. Cinema 2. The Time-Image. London: The Athlone
Press.
Doane, Mary Anne. 2002. The Emergence of Cinematic Time. Modernity,
Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University
Press.
Durand, Régis. 1996. How to See (Photographically). In Fugitive Images, from
Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro, 141–151. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Edwards, Elisabeth. 2009. Thinking Photography beyond the Visual? In
Photography. Theoretical Snapshots, eds. J. J. Long, Andrea Noble, Edward
Welch, 31–49. London, New York: Routledge.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 2005. Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment. In Cinephilia,
Movies, Love and Memory, eds. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, 27–45.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Henning, Michelle. 1995. Digital Encounters: Mythical Pasts and Electronic
Presence. In The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, ed. Martin Lister,
217–235. New York, London: Routledge.
Hölzl, Ingrid. 2011. Photography and Movement. History of Photography vol. 35,
issue 1: 2–5.
Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
New York and London: NYU Press.
Krauss, Rosalind. 1986. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist
Myths. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24 x a Second. Stillness and the Moving Image.
London: Reaktion Books.
50
Ágnes Pethő
Munt, Alex. 2006. Jean-Luc Godard Exhibition: Travel(s) in Utopia, Jean-Luc
Godard 1946–2006, In Search of a Lost Theorem. Senses of Cinema no. 40.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2006/40/godard-travels-in-utopia/
Pethő Ágnes. 2009. (Re)Mediating the Real. Paradoxes of an Intermedial Cinema
of Immediacy. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae. Film and Media Studies vol. 1:
47–69.
Pethő Ágnes. 2011. Cinema and Intermediality. The Passion for the In-Between.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Rexer, Lyle. 2002. Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde: the New Wave in Old
Processes. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Rodowick, David N. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA and London:
Harvard University Press.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. 2010. Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in
Transition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Spielmann, Yvonne. 2008. Video. The Reflexive Medium. Cambridge, MA and
London: The MIT Press.
Stam, Robert. 1992. Reflexivity in Film and Literature: from Don Quixote to JeanLuc Godard. New York: Columbia University Press.
Stewart, Garrett. 1999. Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis.
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Streitberger, Alexander and Van Gelder, Hilde. 2010. Photo-Filmic Images in
Contemporary Visual Culture. Philosophy of Photography vol. 1. no. 1: 48–53.
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51
List of Figures
Figures 1–2. Post-cinema Godard as the man of letters: the (re)creation of his
characteristic fonts by fans at the Atelier Carvalho–Bernau Design, and Chateau
Bezerra’s music video consisting of the “vernacular typography” of street signs.
Figures 3–6. Further post-cinematic traces of Godard: images from Chris
Applebaum’s video for Kelly Osborne’s single, One Word inspired by Alphaville
(1965), and Chanel’s Rouge Allure commercial made as a tribute to The Contempt
(Le Mépris, 1963).
52
Ágnes Pethő
Figures 7–10. Vintage photographs of Godard in the company of Eric Rohmer,
Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina are used to endorse the Band of Outsiders
“This is not a polo shirt.” collection.
53
Figures 11–14. Polaroids of James Marsden pictured in a bleak apartment (with
magazine decoupages on the wall, vinyl records), reading a newspaper or with an
old camera in his hand reminding us of settings and props of early Godard films
like Charlotte and Her Boyfriend (1958), Breathless (1960), The Little Soldier
(1963) or Alphaville (1965).
54
Ágnes Pethő
Figures 15–18. Jason Schwartzman’s role play reminiscent of images of Breathless,
Pierrot le fou (1965), and La Chinoise (1967).
55
Figures 19–20. Ads for the Band of Outsiders collection: Jason Schwartzman
exploiting the surreal quality of an abstract space, and Andrew Garfield driving
the “Godardesque” feel to the extreme, looking as yet another undercover agent
slash “rebel without a cause” while casually carrying “Hanoi Jane” Fonda’s
workout book under his arm on the way to the golf course.
Figure 21. Detail of the web photo gallery of Martin Crespo reconstructing images
from Breathless (http://www.pbase.com/crespoide/a_bout_de_souffle).
56
Ágnes Pethő
Figures 22–23. Photographs inspired by Vivre sa vie made available on the
website of bizzarremind (http://www.bizarremind.com/archives/646).
Figure 24–25. Nancy Davenport’s Weekend Campus (2004) inspired by Godard’s
Weekend (1967). (Stills from the artist’s website: http://www.nancydavenport.
com/weekendcampus1.html)
57
Figures 26–31. Examples of photographic de-framings and chiastic formal
permutations in A Married Woman. Fragments of a Film Made in 1964 (1964).
58
Ágnes Pethő
Figures 32–33. The photographic negative revealing the photographic “undertext”
of the film images in A Married Woman. Fragments of a Film Made in 1964 (1964).
Figures 34–37. Photos populating the spaces of characters and used for
identification, self-identification and self-reference (frames from The Little
Soldier, 1963; The Carabineers, 1963; Her Life to Live, 1962).
59
Figures 38–39. Group photos in Weekend (1967) and Tout va Bien (1972).
Figures 40–41. Photos and writing: the subversive “détournement” of commercial
images (the same type that will later count as “Godardesque” in the retro fashion
world) and creating a montage/palimpsest of ideas (Le Gai Savoir, 1969).
Figures 42–43. Taking photographs as means of seduction and expression of
philosophical and political ideas (Veronica Dreyer/Anna Karina transformed into
an image during the photo session in The Little Soldier, and the “shooting” of a
gun in Le Vent d’Est).
60
Ágnes Pethő
Figures 44–47. Ici et ailleurs (1976) contrasting the fluidity of the viewer
experience with individual images.
Figures 48–57. Film Socialisme (2010): the Odyssey of the photographic image
into the post media age, the passage of the viewer into becoming a “millionaire
in photographic media” and experiencing diverse “modulations” within the
textures of photographic vision.
61

Jean-Luc Godard`s Passages from the Photo

Transcription

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